DELL VOSTRO V131

T

he vostro V131 looks quite similar to the V3350. It comes in a Lucerne red finish on the exterior, which is quite prone to finger prints because of it’s shiny coating. The only bits of steel that are visible are on the hinges. The rest of the laptop looks and feels quite compact and light.

                The ports on the left include the card reader, HDMI, and the USB port, along with a pretty effective fan vent. The right consist of two USB 3.0 port, a VGA port and a 3.5 mm jack. However the absence of a DVD drive may be a problem for some. We were not exactly impressed with the built quality. Though the hinges themselves are pretty sturdy, the area between the hinges is fragile. A slight press from the outside and we could see impression forming on the screen.

                The V131 is powered by the Intel core i3-2330M processor running at a clock speed of 2.2 GHz. The other spaces include 2GB of RAM a 500 GB hard drive and the integrated Intel HD graphics. It has also got the usual stuff like Bluetooth 3.0, wi-fi, an integrated webcam and a fingerprint reader. Everything is held together by the windows 7 professional operating system. Boot up times for the V131 were pretty quick so you will be up and running in no time. The brightness, however did not really impressed and hence features as one of the cons of this laptop. Video playback as a result was not something we really liked about this laptop, because colors didn’t appear bright of the vivid enough. The speakers though are loud enough for personal use.

                Typing on the normal sized chiclet keyboard is a pleasure, and the soft keys on the touchpad make for easy manoeuvring. The touchpad itself is pretty smooth considering how often this part of the laptop makes or breaks usability. The vent is on the side and we ran the laptop though a few performance intensive programs to gauge its heat dissipating capability and the vostro passed with flying colors. We put the V131 through our standard synthetic and real world tests and the result were very impressive.

                The V131 comes with a 65 Wh battery and in our battery eater test, it lasted an hour and forty minutes. Under normal performance you will easily be able to crank out 4.5 to 5 hours. Plus it has integrated graphics so it will be able to last longer than those with dedicated graphics card.